It’s absolutely nutjobs like you that make it pretty damn hard to imagine such a thing as a genuinely intelligent christian (or catholic).

Cool, we get it. You believe in god, you think everyone should, and you don’t like that those stupid meanie head atheists won’t play your game, and are putting signs on busses and not sitting down in their corner quietly, hiding and hoping you won’t notice them. We get it, dude.

However, you’d stand a fairer chance of convincing even one person who doesn’t already agree with you if you’d refrain from:

Insisting that we only pick on the christian faith. Stop that. The reason you see more actions targeting or specifying Abrahamic faiths is that they are prevalent in the society we live in. That makes them more relevant to the discussion. Dig? Cool? Got it? Gonna stop making that tired argument? I sure hope so.

Fundie: “And so, if you’re gonna criticiz— you know, religious people for the Inquisition, then you need to praise them for the civil rights movement,” he said. You can’t sort of have it both ways. And similarly, if you’re going to praise atheists for these things, you need to criticize theStalinists. I mean, some of the most murderous regimes that we’ve had in the 20th century were atheistic regimes.”
What this theistard refuses to acknowledge is that he is conveniently comparing apples and oranges. As I have mentioned before, I do not deny that some atheists do bad things, as some Christians do. The difference is, for example, in the case of the Inquisition, murders and torture were condoned in the name of their religion and their imaginary god. Even if Stalin was indeed a devout atheist, he did not commit his tyranny in the name of religion or because he claimed to defend reason. Stalin was simply a megalomaniac and a political opportunist. When was the last time you heard a terrorist act being done in the name of atheism or science or reason? When was the last tine a terrorist act was done in the name of a religion’s imaginary god?

*snicker*

Stalin was not motivated by atheism; if he was motivated by an “ism”, it was Communism. While communism is an ostensibly atheistic political philosophy, atheism is not inherently communistic. To restated that more clearly: communists are supposed to be atheists, but atheists do not have to be communists – no matter what your local fundie tells you. The intent of the communist revolution was to eliminate capitalism, not religion.

An atheist doesn’t need to be a communist, but he/she doesn’t need neither to be a capitalist, an anarchist, a feudalist, or anything else. In fact, an atheist doesn’t also need to be a humanist. There are atheists that see humanism as a kind of ‘speciesism’ against other biological organisms, and thus reject it. There are also anti-humanist atheists that do not think that every human being deserves respect simply for being human.

There are all kinds of atheists, politically, socially, economically, etc. Get it, theistard?

Moving on…

Although Stalin was an atheist, he was praised as a god in the Soviet Union and in all the official Communist Parties in the world.

An example:

“O great Stalin, O leader of the peoples,
Thou who broughtest man to birth.
Thou who fructifiest the earth.
Thou who restorest the centuries,
Thou who makest bloom the spring,
Thou who makest vibrate the musical cords.
Thou, splendour of my spring,
O Thou, Sun reflected by millions of hearts …”
(Pravda, August 28, 1936.)

And another one:

“I would have compared him to a white mountain – but the mountain has a summit.
I would have compared him to the depths of the sea – but the sea has a bottom.
I would have compared him to the shining moon – but the moon shines at midnight, not at noon.
I would have compared him to the brilliant sun – but the sun radiates at noon, not at midnight.”
(Znamya, Soviet Authors’ Union Monthly, October 1946.)

Perhaps Stalin is a self-theist?

Also, the USSR didn’t reject religious doctrines out of some ‘rational analysis’, but because Marxist-Leninist doctrines called for it. It’s good to remember that unquestioned adherence to those doctrines drove them to reject real science (especially genetics) because, according to them, it contradicted orthodoxy and was therefore false. Ring a bell, theistards?

The problem here isn’t Stalin and his supposed atheism. It is about unquestioning obedience to dogma, whatever that particular dogma may be. That is why religion is so dangerous, and this why theistards need to wake the fuck up.

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